


In This Dark World and Wide

by angelheadedhipster



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Character sketches, F/M, Gen, North, Pre-Canon, Snow, Yuletide 2016, grownups!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 10:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8887027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelheadedhipster/pseuds/angelheadedhipster
Summary: Before the story starts, moments in the strange frozen North.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [motleystitches (furius)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furius/gifts).



In the North the land sees all, and reacts to nothing. Its beauty and pitilessness test everyone, and make warriors of those who survive, and those who choose to remain. Lord Asriel looks out to the horizon, and feels the coldness of the air on his face. He chose this. This is the world he wants to be in - unyielding, true, and desperate. 

Asriel had found what he came for: there is a skull in his rucksack, ready to be brandished at the fools and toadies at the Magisterium. The fact that it is not actually the skull of Stanislau Grumman won’t matter - he would get from them what he needed. Money, an expedition. The beginnings of a bridge between worlds. 

This substance - this ‘Dust’ - this was the secret. This was the origination of the Church’s hold on freedom, and justice, and Asriel had never been able to abide restrictions on himself. Injustice - that was what he could not abide.

Stelmaria hissed, and Asriel turned to look at her. There were shapes on the horizon that her leopard eyes could see and his human eyes could not. 

“We’ll get back on the road,” Asriel said. No reason to attract attention, yet. There would be a time for that, but not now. Now he was setting in motion his edifice, his challenge, and that meant preparation. Planning. The process of bringing together those people and beings who would be useful to him. 

A bridge between worlds. No one had attempted it, until now. This was his weapon, and he would bring with him an army the likes of which Heaven had never seen. 

+++

The horizon is dusky, misted and blurred. Lee Scoresby opens the valve of his balloon, inflating the bag and sending he and his cargo higher. Perhaps from above the clouds he’ll have a better view.

There’s a chill deep within his bones, one that his bearskin coat does not prevent. There’s a cold front coming in, he can feel it. It has been an exceptionally cold winter, and he hasn’t been able to shake a sense of foreboding. He’s lived in the North for years now, but sometimes it still surprises him how different it is. The sky itself is different. There was a warmth to the sky, when he was in Texas, that he hasn’t seen in years.

He’ll have to check with Iorek, see if the bear or anyone in his kingdom knows anything about the changes in the weather this year. The Armored Bears see things differently, and Lee has learned to appreciate that. They are at home in this landscape in a way that he - with his thin skin, his drawl, his desert daemon - never will be. Perhaps the Bears will tell him that the land runs in cycles, and he just hasn’t seen this kind of winter yet. Perhaps.

Lee can’t see what’s ahead of him. The balloon floats onwards, steady on the wind, a part of the air around him. Hester’s eyes are stinging in the wind, but she doesn’t say anything. There are miles to go before his cargo is delivered, and whatever foreboding the future holds, is not coming that fast.

Beyond the next cloud, he will be able to see. 

+++

Serafina Pekkala watches the balloon float across the horizon, a steady glide that moves in a directional pattern all its own. It floats across the white blue air, until even with her witch’s vision she cannot see its progress. The sky is misty today, muddied, hard to pierce through. Serafina closes her eyes and feels the sound of the snow, the wan light of the sun a faint heat on her skin, the smell of the moss frozen in the tundra. 

With her senses stretched so carefully, she hears a small mammal rustle in its hole, beneath her. 

Kaisa is with the Gyptian’s, visiting Serafina’s child. Serafina is curious about the child’s progress, about what he looks like now, but it is a detached curiosity. The same curiosity she feels about the shape of the ice shelf as the seasons change, about the lichen as it grows across the range.

She mounts her branch cloud pine and begins to fly, the cold a cutting sensation on her skin, as if the temperature is itself a liquid. Her cape billows behind her, and the mist congeals around her. What she sees does not change - the same grey white fog, as if she is moving but not changing location at all. 

There have been signs, and the signs are beginning to come together. The stars, the circles. Things seen in the fires, patterns in animal movement. There is something coming, and the witches will have their part to play in it. 

She arrives at the meeting place, other queens dropping in from the sky onto the flat cold ground. Ruta Skadi is grinning, her cheeks a high pink, as she stands in the circle next to Serafina. Excitement over her latest lover, Serafina imagines, but she doesn’t ask, and Ruta doesn’t offer. 

“Sisters,” says Juta Kamainer. “Queens. Clans. We see what is to come, and it something we have never seen before. Now we must discuss the part we will play.”

+++

She had never been this far North before. Her daemon’s golden fur is puffed up, making him look larger and keeping him warmer. Marisa Coulter wraps her own mink cape closer around herself, and gazes out the window of the airship.

The sky is unending white, a faint line of grey the only evidence that there is a division between air and land. Wind whistles around them, and the cold almost has a taste.

Marisa can feel the crispness of the air, and admires it. She feels as if things could be less complicated here, sharper. This is a good place for the work to be done.

She will, of course, not have to spend that much time at the installation herself. Setting it up will be a chore, but then she will go back to London on her own, as her talent is for recruitment. The site itself will be able to be maintained by the staff, once they’ve undergone the procedure themselves, of course. She will be supervising, and maintaining.

The sky may be cloudy, but Marisa feels as clear as she has ever felt. This is the Magisterium’s greatest work, and it will be her greatest glory to achieve it it. This is work for Heaven itself, the likes of which Heaven has never seen.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is, of course, a Milton quote.


End file.
